#oneaday Day 767: Why I continue to write in an age of AI

I read a good piece earlier that got me thinking: why do I continue to tap out words here, day after day, in an age where those odious "Generate with AI" buttons are ubiquitous, whether you want them or not? (Even here in my own self-hosted version of WordPress, I cannot escape the "Improve with AI" button that I have never, ever clicked, even out of curiosity.)

close up photo of a pencil — Photo by Poppy Thomas Hill on Pexels.com

It's a fair question. Over the course of the last eighteen years, I have written 3.35 million words on this site across 4,642 posts. (Okay, technically a chunk of those were originally posted on my now-defunct blog on Patreon, but since that effectively took the place of this site while it was active, I am counting them.) I could stop at any point. In fact, I have stopped on multiple occasions. And yet something keeps bringing me back. And, moreover, every time I come back, the absolute last thing on my mind is to get the lying, lake-boiling plagiarism robot to "write" something for me.

Because why would you do that? If you want to write, just fucking write. Generative AI isn't "democratising" the creative process, as some people argue, because the creative process was democratised the moment everyone could afford writing implements and things to write on. Moreover, if you get the stupid dumbass robot to regurgitate some vapid garbage on your behalf, you have not written that. You do not deserve any credit whatsoever, even for "engineering" the prompt. You are a lazy, feckless idiot who does not want to do something creative; you want to fill the world with more content that no-one actually wants. To quote a memorable Reddit post I saw once in response to someone like this: "best of luck on something literally no-one, including you, will read."

"Oh, but it helps for resear-" Shut up. Shut up. It demonstrably gets things wrong a statistically significant proportion of the time, thereby making it completely worthless for research by its very definition.

"Oh, but it helps for brainsto-" Shut up. Shut up. What you are talking about is the creative process. Brainstorming is part of it all! The creative process doesn't start the moment you start typing, writing, recording or using your tools. It starts the moment a little light goes on in your mind and you have a vague idea that you want to make something. It starts the moment you get a flash of a character you want to construct. It starts the moment you get the hint of a melody. It starts the moment you read something else that inspires you to want to write something on the same subject — as I am doing right now.

I do not want generative AI. I did not ask for generative AI. I have no use for generative AI. And I think people who rely on generative AI to conjure some shit up out of a vague prompt rather than writing things themselves are, as previously noted, lazy, feckless idiots who have no interest in genuine creativity. They do not care about the quality of their eventual output; all they care about is that they have produced content. Consistency of content is key! Churn it out like a good little drone! Doesn't matter if it's good or not, so long as it gets engagement!

(Aside: I will begrudgingly admit that generative AI does have some potential use cases, but only as part of a human-led workflow and only if it is not being used as a means of attempting to replace the skills and knowledge of a real person. Even then, I can't help but feel there are other, less damaging ways to achieve the same thing — often with better results. And, indeed, many things that are now labelled as "AI-powered" are, in fact, not generative AI-based — they are just using "AI" as a supposedly fashionable buzzword, apparently blissfully unaware of the growing distaste for anything labelled "AI", when what they actually mean is "computer-controlled" or "based on machine learning". The auto-accompaniment mode on the Yamaha keyboard I used as a child would probably be labelled "AI" today when it is nothing of the sort.)

I often find myself thinking about all this, considering that I write something on this site every day as the result of a self-imposed but only loosely enforced challenge — and part of that challenge is to just write something, regardless of if it ends up being any good. At no point do I feel like I am creating content, because I am not doing this for anyone other than myself, and I am certainly not doing it for "engagement". I am doing it because I enjoy it; because I find it a helpful means of expressing myself; and because, occasionally, it allows me to form a connection with another person, when something I have written resonates with them, for one reason or another.

This website has over 3.5 million words on it, but not a single one of them has come from a machine. Not a single one of them has been written out of a desire to create content. Every one of them has come out of my brain because I wanted to write them, because there was something I wanted to express, because there was something I wanted to remember or because there was something I wanted to process. This may seem like a stupid, pointless website to the casual observer, but to me, it is immeasurably valuable.

If I had sullied even the tiniest bit of it with generative AI, it would no longer be mine. And yes, I'm aware that by the very virtue of it being On The Internet, it has probably already been ingested into one or more of the AI models out there. But I'm not taking it down or giving up on this valuable means of self-expression, because fuck you, Clammy Sam Altman and Wario Amodei, that's why.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 766: Verify your age

There's a meme going around on Bluesky today where you write "verify your age" and then post something in text or image form that you remember from Times Past™. In the absence of anything particularly interesting happening today, I thought I would do a bumper crop of these in one post. So prepare to verify my age! With, apparently, a lot of things about the phone. That wasn't deliberate, but it just worked out that way.

a vintage telephone — Photo by fotokirisci on Pexels.com

Answering the phone by giving your phone number to the person who just dialled it. This is one of those things that, when I was young, my Mum gave the impression of it being really important. I always felt weird doing it, but we continued doing these even after phone numbers got longer. "Great Gransden [xxx]" became "[xxx][yyy]". (Numbers censored so you don't phone my parents, who are still at the same house and phone number.)

Answering the phone at home with a "script" to determine who is calling, please? If I felt awkward reciting digits to a mystery person before I knew who it was, I felt really awkward acting like a receptionist. I wonder how much feeling obliged to do this as a kid has contributed to my general distaste for using the telephone today.

Having a phone number that, excluding area code, was three digits long. Yep, really; we had an area code that was five digits long, and a phone number that was three. During my childhood, this changed to a different five-digit area code with a "1" as its second digit, and which covered a wider region, and a six-digit phone number.

Being able to accurately dial a full-length phone number using a rotary phone and not panicking halfway through that you're not sure if you pulled the "9" around far enough. The phone in our hall was a rotary one. While I never really liked having to use the phone, dialling it was pretty fun. If you like mechanical noises, I encourage you to go play with a rotary phone, as it makes some very good sounds.

Being able to remember at least five phone numbers that were not your own. At some point, I could remember my own phone number, my Nan B's phone number (but not my Nan D's), my friend Matthew's phone number, my friend Edd's phone number and the phone number for my school. And possibly some more. Now I can just about remember Andie's mobile number… plus my parents' phone number, which is the same as it's been for nearly 50 years (and used to be "mine" also) so that one's kind of cheating.

Having a phone that actually rang, like, with a bell, not an electronic beeper. Again, the hall phone had a proper ringer and dear Lord it was loud. Heaven help you if you were standing next to it when it rang. Interestingly, every so often I do think I hear a proper ringer phone somewhere — I believe they might use them in places like construction sites still, as that piercing ring can be heard from a mile off.

"Going on the computer" being a discrete activity rather than the default behaviour. Get home from school, do homework, have dinner. Then, if I had been "good", I could maybe "go on the computer", as long as my Dad wasn't using it for anything. I feel like we lost something when we plugged ourselves into our PCs semi-permanently — and definitely when we effectively started carrying around a tiny PC in our pocket.

Sweet treats costing less than a pound each. There was an ice-cream man who came to our school every lunchtime — I assume (hope) he had some sort of special arrangement with the school — and he sold cans of drink for 30p, and "2p sweets" for… well, you know. (You could buy a bag of 2p sweets, too. I don't think we got screwed over with those.) Nowadays you'll pay a quid or more for a can of Coke, and the same again for a basic bitch chocolate bar. Don't even get me started how a "quick trip to the shops for some snacks" can end up costing £40 or more these days.

Going to a newsagent and coming out with something paper that you can read. I'm not even sure we have a newsagent anywhere near us any more. There's a pathetic little "Magazines" section in our local Sainsbury's, but it's nothing compared to the glory days of my Mum getting pissed off at my Dad for standing around reading Computer Shopper in WHSmith rather than actually buying a copy. I internalised my Mum's objections and preferred to buy a magazine that I wanted to read; it was much more fun reading it at home at my own pace.

Going out of the house to be with people who shared an interest. While I'm eternally sorry that I'm just a little bit too young to have been able to enjoy the phenomenon of "Computer Clubs" and "User Groups" in the early days of the 8-bit micros, when I was a kid I did have things that I went to each week and enjoyed, along with my peers. Cub Scouts was probably the highlight of these; that was an interesting time where I learned a lot of things that I probably otherwise wouldn't have found out about, had the opportunity to go (extremely heavily supervised) camping, and just generally had a pretty good time. I know that "interest groups" for grown-ups do exist, but I don't really know where to begin looking for them these days — particularly with all the dogshit information that is out there on platforms like Facebook these days. I miss the simplicity of your parents just knowing that there's a Cub Scout pack in the next village over, and wouldn't you like to join it, your friends are going to join!

So there you are. That's my age. I hope you enjoy it.

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#oneaday Day 765: Role-playing

One thing I regret not really getting into when I was younger is role-playing games — of the tabletop variety. Actually, saying I didn't "get into" role-playing games isn't accurate at all; I've bought a whole bunch of sourcebooks over the years (I had a great collection of Vampire: The Masquerade books while at university!) but just, for one reason or another, never really had the chance to play them all that much.

figurines and dice on board game map — Photo by Stephen Hardy on Pexels.com

I have two particularly fond memories of times when I have been able to indulge in some role-playing, and interestingly enough, neither of them involve a well-established, rules-heavy system. In both cases, they were simple acts of collective creativity — and they were vast amounts of fun as a result.

The first time wasn't really an organised session as such. I was in my second year at university, living in a grotty old flat that had very large rooms. Some of my friends from my school days had come down to visit, and they were sleeping in the living room; rather than retiring to my own bedroom down the hall, I decided to sleep in the living room with them. And before long, rather than falling asleep, one of our number kicked off a completely improvised role-playing session where our probably drunk, definitely tired and increasingly delirious selves got our characters into increasingly ridiculous situations — inevitably with the worst possible outcomes constantly happening to one of our number, because that was the funniest way things could go.

I forget the details of the "adventure", such as it was, but I do recall that my friend Edd found himself under attack by a giant penis monster at one point. So, naturally, he decided to cast the spell he'd made up called "REMOVE COCK", and you can imagine what the actual result of that was. It was an utterly ridiculous evening that I will always remember immensely fondly — and not a single die rolled along the way.

The other occasion was when I was around at a friend's house, and one of said friend's friends with whom I had previously become casually acquainted said he was going to run a role-playing game session for us, using what he described as a "freeform system" that he'd devised himself. Said system had just three statistics: Attack, Defence and Power, and all three of those statistics fluctuated according to the things we were doing; you'd "spend" points from each on various actions, and could regain them in various ways, usually by making progress through the adventure.

Because the system was so freeform, we were invited to come up with any kind of character we wanted. Being big into Japanese role-playing games at the time — not like now, obviously — my character was somewhere between a vaguely imagined half-elf character I'd mentally doodled at various points over the prior months, and basically Dante from Devil May Cry. Lots of flashy moves, big sword, pyrotechnics, all that sort of thing. His name was Rush Hurin.

Alongside Rush we had The Luggage from Discworld, a sentient suit of armour named Arryth, a cloud of amorphous pink gas and the archangel Tyrael from Diablo. It was a motley crew to be sure, but we had some grand adventures — and the skill of our dungeon master was such that he was able to devise dungeons and scenarios on the fly that meant we all had an opportunity to shine along the way.

Okay, yes, he pulled puzzles from a straight-up Big Book of Puzzles that he brought along with him — and on more than one occasion we entered a room in a dungeon with an elaborate-looking mechanism that had a big sign on it saying "COME BACK LATER" — but even using that "source material" and occasional little "cheats" to keep things flowing along, we ended up with an enormously entertaining adventure that culminated, as I recall, with us fighting a skyscraper-sized flaming demon, each using our own unique abilities to bring it down in various ways — culminating with The Luggage swallowing it and sending it to an unknown other dimension, as most of our other encounters concluded.

Both of these were great fun, yes, but I also just kind of… hunger for an opportunity to play something as basic bitch as Dungeons & Dragons, even though I know that's not fashionable any more. I always thought Vampire: The Masquerade would be fascinating to play, too — hence why I had a bunch of sourcebooks for it back in my early 20s — but that, more than almost anything else, strikes me as something you very much Need The Right Group For.

Why am I talking about all this? Well, I watched an episode of Mythical Kitchen this evening where they had the cast of Critical Role on there, and it reminded me that I've never… watched, listened to, whatever you do with Critical Role, and I was thinking I should probably correct that at some point. Sure, it's not quite the same as being part of my own campaign, but I think I might enjoy it… maybe it's time to add it to the "bedtime listening" rotation.

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#oneaday Day 764: Just games

There was yet another round of Tedious Discourse™ today over what the word "retro" really means, if anything, when it comes to video games. As always, there were lots of varying definitions, no agreement, and a bunch of people getting in a bit of a flap about it when their definitions of "retro" didn't line up with other people's definition of "retro".

Several people, as part of this process, pointed out that the term "retro" is not really all that helpful any more, and I'm inclined to agree. And yes, I'm aware I say this as part of a company that specifically markets itself as "retro gaming"-focused — and someone who has a "Retro Video Games" category on his blog — but what I'm about to talk about applies to all that, also.

My feelings are pretty simple: drop the "retro". They're just games. Zork? Game. Adventure for 2600? Game. The Last of Us? Game. The Witcher 3? Game. Gone Home? Game. (There, that should have covered everything that might piss at least one person off.)

The reason I say this is that as soon as you introduce the word "retro" into the mix, you also introduce a perceived barrier to entry. "Retro gaming" is perceived as a markedly different hobby to "gaming", whereas this doesn't really happen with any other medium. You might have people who are into different genres of books, movies, music, TV shows and suchlike, but you don't get people going "yeah, I'm a retro reader". Even people who make the majority of their reading time involve pre-20th century literature just "enjoy reading" — because most of them don't confine themselves to that one, single niche all of the time. Why? Because that's daft. Just because you like Jane Eyre doesn't mean you can't enjoy The Da Vinci Code or whatever. And you're not any less of a "reader" if you do.

The net effect of this when it comes to gaming is that you get people who will only ever play the latest and greatest games, and if it came out more than three weeks ago it might as well not exist, and you get people who will happily play a triple-A cinematic blockbuster one evening, an 8-bit home computer game another and a PlayStation RPG the next. You also get people who fall somewhere between those two extremes, which is a perfectly reasonable and healthy way to approach things. No-one is saying you have to enjoy everything from throughout the entirety of gaming history, but to draw a completely imaginary "hard cutoff" line between what is "modern" and what is "retro" based on, let's face it, nothing other than vibes is kind of ridiculous.

Case in point: currently, I am playing through Soul Blazer. This is a game originally released for Super NES in 1992 (1994 if you're PAL like me). There is absolutely nothing about this game that someone who has only ever played games released in the last three weeks would not be able to grasp. There's a common misconception that "retro games are complicated, you need to read the manual", but Soul Blazer is literally "move in four directions, hit things with your sword", and everything else is introduced either organically through gameplay, or explicitly told to you. You could release Soul Blazer today, completely unchanged — gorgeous pixel art has never gone out of fashion, thankfully — and it would be regarded as a good game, because it is a good game. It's not a good retro game, it's just a good game.

I think some of this likely originally stems from the crossover between the Mega Drive and SNES era to the age of PlayStation, Saturn and N64. Rumours abounded at the time that developers were specifically being discouraged from making 2D pixel art games on PlayStation, because polygonal 3D — even the relatively janky polygonal 3D of the PlayStation — was regarded as the One True Future. But I'm not sure quite how true that ever was, because one of the absolute most beloved games of that particular period — Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — was resolutely 2D, with only very occasional polygons used for special effects or parallax backgrounds. And there are countless other beautiful, wonderful and well-loved 2D games from that era — particularly on Saturn. Marginally less so on N64, but that was operating in a bit of a world of its own anyway. (Also, play Mischief Makers.)

That doesn't really explain how this sort of thinking appears to have persisted for this long, though. Yes, over the last 20 years or so there very much has been a rise in the sort of gamer who only ever buys that year's Call of Duty, FIFA/Madden or equivalent and leaves it at that, who doesn't really consider the history of the medium. But there seems to be the perception that there are plenty of people who have been gaming since the '80s — even earlier in some cases — who, for whatever reason, will not play anything released before a certain date — or, at the very least, will corral those experiences into a distinct "retro gaming" category, distinct from the implied "proper" modern gaming sector where they spend the majority of their time. I don't doubt people like that exist, but I wonder how widespread they really are.

Some of this is down to access; we're all familiar with that Video Game History Foundation report, or at least I hope we are at this point. But "not commercially available" is by no means the same as "inaccessible" these days. You don't even need original hardware; emulation of pretty much everything up to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era is in a good place, and after that (some would argue during that period) the newer games consoles were basically just PCs anyway, so outside of a dwindling number of genuine exclusives, you can play all that stuff pretty easily, too. At this point, everyone, everywhere, so long as you have some combination of an Internet connection, a computer and a monitor or TV, can enjoy pretty much any game released within the last 50 years without very much in the way of effort.

And modern rereleases of stuff that first came out many years ago are happening, too, if you don't want to delve into the proverbial high seas! There's Hamster's Arcade and Console Archives series on the current consoles. There are numerous bespoke releases of classic console, computer and arcade games on various platforms. Evercade, the platform I work on, has a huge number of cartridges at this point, covering more that 700 games between them, all of them officially licensed rereleases!

Any perceived barrier to entry that "retro gaming" might have had in the past — be that the technical knowhow required to get old finicky hardware up and running; the possession of vintage CRT TV hardware; an understanding of what "RGB" is; the ability to recap an Xbox or replace the battery in a Dreamcast — has not been there for a good long while, unless you want to enjoy a specific type of experience. (Snobbery over whether you're "doing retro gaming right" is a whole other discussion, mind, and it's hopefully already clear where my opinions fall on that side of things.)

If you enjoy games, you (hopefully) just enjoy games. There is absolutely no rule written down anywhere that places down a hard boundary of what you are allowed to enjoy, based on whatever combination of "year of release" and "age of player" people are using to calculate their completely arbitrary definition of "retro". Sure, some older stuff might take a little adjusting to if you're unfamiliar with it — much as reading Jane Eyre takes a bit of adjustment after reading The Da Vinci Code — but it's still the same basic form of entertainment at heart: push buttons, fun (or at least interesting) stuff happens.

Go on. Spoil yourself. Play something from a system you've never explored before. Revisit a game you haven't played since childhood. Fire up a copy of that one game you always saw in magazines and lusted over, but which you never got for Christmas or birthdays. And, with an appropriately receptive and open mind, I pretty much guarantee that you'll have an experience just as interesting, compelling and worthwhile as if you played something that released last week.

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#oneaday Day 763: My brain has melted

It's been unbearably hot again today. The thing I hate the most about unbearably hot weather is how lethargic it makes you in both body and mind. It has cooled off a fair bit now the sun has gone down, but my brain is still in a semi-liquid state, meaning it is proving enormously difficult to make myself do anything, even if the anything I choose to do is enjoyable.

skull with brain — Photo by Sami Aksu on Pexels.com

(That said, I'm here, aren't I? So maybe it's all starting to solidify again a bit.)

Patti, being a black cat with a fairly dense coat, has been suffering a bit in the heat, I think. She has taken to spending most of the day in what we call her "hole" — a little bit of the catio that attaches to the cat flap in the back of the house, and which is now a nice shady spot because Andie has put a bunch of seedling trays on top of it. She seems fairly content when she's in there, and she's up, about and active when the worst of the day's heat has passed by, so perhaps she just has the right idea — sleep through the worst of the heat and get up to cause mischief as the sun starts to set. And yes, she's getting plenty of water and the opportunity to cool off in the air conditioned bedroom whenever she wants.

Oliver, meanwhile, has been just fine. He's very much back to his old self: full of energy and mischief, and putting across the distinct impression that he doesn't even know what the word "sad" means. I am glad. I was concerned that his experiences living rough for three weeks might have traumatised him in some way — and perhaps they have — but he certainly seems to have adjusted back to life with us perfectly well.

The only real change we've seen in him — aside from all the weight he had lost when we first found him, which he's mostly put back on again now — is that he seemingly wants to be near one or both of us the vast majority of the time. He doesn't necessarily have to be interacting with us directly — sometimes he just wants to sit on the floor in the hallway near where we're working, or lying on the floor in the spare room next to my study, knowing that I'm there. He also follows me around the house even more than he did previously, which is adorable, but I do worry that one day I will trip right over him!

Andie is also suffering a bit, as she's on some medications that make it difficult for her to regulate her temperature, which I'm sure you can probably appreciate are not ideal to be taking in the middle of a heatwave. I am… kind of sort of OK, aside from the melty brain predicament I described at the start of this post. I often catch myself just sort of staring into space, wanting to go and do something fun, but having great difficulty mustering up the energy and enthusiasm to do so. Still, acknowledging that I am doing this thing, much like I acknowledge elements of my self, thoughts and feelings in therapy, is a helpful step towards breaking out of that cycle and going to do something.

The next challenge I need to tackle is exactly what to spend the remainder of the evening on. I could play some more Soul Blazer, or some Final Fantasy XI, or some Rhythm Paradise Groove, or some Star Fox, or…

Oh dear. I think my brain melted again.

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#oneaday Day 762: Some nice things

I started typing out a post about how shit everything was. I got to about 600 words, and I even found a really good stock image of some horseshit.

Then I looked at what I had written and thought, "no, I should not give in to despair, even if it does seem like it has been a very long time since anything has happened which I can honestly say is to the betterment of humanity as a whole". So I deleted all of it, replaced the image of horseshit with a picture of Patti (above) and decided that a helpful thought exercise would be to ponder some Nice Things. Doesn't matter what they are, how big they are, how important they are — just that they are Nice Things that I thought were worth celebrating. So let's pick out… ooh, let's say, five, as that's a nice number to work with. And I'm going to focus on gaming because a lot of stuff in gaming sucks right now.

Mike Bithell's new game looks cool

Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame, has been teasing his new game for a while, and yesterday he finally revealed it. It's called Vampirium: 1997 and is set in an alternate near-history where Dracula is the king of England, and you are one of his retainers, with dark powers all your own.

Bithell describes the game as an "immersive sim", but if you're thinking of a first-person adventure-style affair — which is what the term "immersive sim" usually gets applied to — you might be surprised to discover that this is a rather more abstract affair that, from what we've seen so far, looks to take a lot of cues from tabletop gaming. The "immersive sim" aspect comes from how you have a lot of freedom to tackle situations as you see fit — supposedly you can "click and combine game tiles to access verbs and craft your own diabolical resolutions". Sounds pretty interesting to me!

The game doesn't have a release date as yet, but will be launching into Early Access in the near future, and having a bunch of stuff added to it as the community gets to grips with it. It will then have a "1.0" release when all that is done, and we should have another great vampire game on our hands.

Wadjet Eye Games is 20 years old

If you (yes, you!) have ever uttered the fateful words "adventure games are dead" at any point in recent history, you have not been paying attention, because one of the absolute best developer-publishers to ever Do That Thing turned 20 years old today. Yes! Wadjet Eye Games has been releasing excellent adventure games since 2006, and their work has been going from strength to strength year after year — both in terms of the stuff they've made themselves, and the titles they've published from other developers.

I honestly, genuinely believe that the point-and-click adventure game is in a better place today than it ever was back in the LucasArts and Sierra heyday; don't get me wrong, I adore the "golden age" games and always will, since they were formative experiences for me. But you cannot look at incredible recent(ish) releases like The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (developed by Cloak & Dagger and published by Wadjet Eye) and Old Skies (developed in-house at Wadjet Eye) and think "nah, it was way better back then".

It fills my heart with gladness to know that amid all the chaos in the games industry right now, a company dedicated to releasing games of the kind it believes in — not what shareholders want, not what passing trends say you "should" be making, not what is supposedly the most profitable — is able to not only survive, but thrive. I sincerely hope Wadjet Eye Games continues to stick around for many years to come.

Scott Pilgrim EX is fun

My limited edition copy of Scott Pilgrim EX, which comes in a lovely oversized NeoGeo-esque clamshell case, arrived yesterday, and I spent most of the evening playing it through. It's a lot of fun! It successfully manages to feel true to the prior game — which is an all-time favourite — while shaking things up a bit and keeping things interesting.

I'll have more to say about this over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future, but suffice it to say for now that I had a lot of fun with my first playthrough — and with a full run through the game only being about 2.5 hours in total, I can see plenty more in my future, particularly with the possibility of online multiplayer in the mix.

Soul Blazer is great

I already knew this, but my recent starting-a-new-playthrough-and-I'll-probably-definitely-finish-it-this-time go at Quintet's awesome SNES action RPG Soul Blazer has reminded me how much I like that game. Again, I will write more about this on MoeGamer when I've actually beaten the damn thing — I'm a little shy of halfway through so far, I believe — but I am happy to say, right now, that if you have never played this delightful little game (and it is pretty little — I reckon it'll take less than 10 hours to beat, which begs the question why I've never gotten around to doing so) then you are very much missing out on one of the most charming 16-bit games there ever was.

I have finished "The Best Bit" of Final Fantasy XI

A lot of people seem to agree that Chains of Promathia is the best bit of Final Fantasy XI and now, outside of the epilogue quests and the optional Bahamut fight (which I might wait to do until I'm level 99 for the sake of simplicity) I have finally beaten it! This has been a kind of "gaming ambition" for me pretty much ever since I played Final Fantasy XI for the first time, and I have finally made it a reality.

This is another thing I would like to write about on MoeGamer in the very near future, so I will simply say that I enjoyed myself, and I'm glad I finally took this journey. I think I need at least a short break before heading off to seek the Treasures of Aht Urhgan though…!

Anyway, those are Five Good Things of Varying Relevance in gaming right now. I post these not to diminish the impact or importance of the Bad Stuff happening at the moment, but instead to hopefully provide a little reprieve. I sincerely wish that everyone who is going through tough times right now — and there are a lot of people going through tough times in the industry right now — is able to at least find some joy in the day-to-day, and doesn't give in to despair; I also hope that many of these people will tell their stories, frankly and honestly, because they need to be told. And they need to be told by the people who have been affected, not by some random idiot on the Internet.

One day, I hope these terrible times will be behind us, and we will be able to look back on them and go "fucking hell, never do that again". Until then, take care of yourselves. Don't give up. And play Soul Blazer.

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#oneaday Day 761: The depths of the id

I think one of the hardest things to watch during the latest of myriad sessions of layoffs over at XBOX, The Everything Console has been seeing id Software be gutted. Everyone has That One Company who always made stuff that they liked, which has been there since their childhood, and for me I think that company is id Software.

Some of my fondest memories of playing games in the early (relatively speaking) days of PC gaming were of id Software titles. Commander Keen. Wolfenstein 3-D. Doom. Quake. All absolute legends of gaming history, each for their own reasons.

I didn't just love id's games for the games themselves — though that was a big part of it. I loved them for the way they brought my friends and I together over shared enjoyment of them. I loved them for helping me come out of my shell a bit and do some part-time work for a local shareware library. I loved them for how they allowed me to relate to the people I worked alongside during my Year 10 work experience in the PC Zone offices.

And, of course, I loved them for introducing me to shareware, providing me with hours of entertainment for absolutely no cost whatsoever. I played the shareware episodes of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom to absolute death, only coming to the full versions some time later — many years later in some cases. At the time I was playing these games, I was still a teenager, and not financially independent enough to do something as serious as mail-ordering the full version of a game from the States. I kind of wish I had at least ordered a copy of Doom; those original mail-order boxed versions are worth a fair bit now!

And there's all the surrounding culture, too. Wolfenstein 3-D introduced me to modding games. I'm not generally a huge fan of modding games these days, but back in the Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom days I found it fascinating, and highly enjoyable to make Wolfenstein 3-D maps in particular. (At the time, I found Doom editing to be a bit confusing and never really got on with it. Maybe I should try it again now I am old and, in theory, less stupid.) Hell, as I've told the story numerous times before, modding Wolfenstein 3-D once earned me $200 and a place in the official "Super Upgrades" expansion pack by Apogee — an oft-forgotten but nonetheless official addon to the original game.

Of course I'm aware that the id Software of today is very different from the id Software I grew up with — but I'm sure there were at least some people who have built a whole career and a life there. While the company isn't going away entirely, I am saddened to see it take such a devastating blow; the current state of the games industry is, frankly, really quite worrying, and I'm concerned a lot of well-established names aren't going to survive what is increasingly looking like a full-on crash.

I'm not going to be angry and yell about what has happened, for a variety of reasons. Most of all I just want to raise a glass to id Software, makers of some of the greatest games of all time, and celebrate the amazing times they have given me over the years — and continue to give me, as I so often return to their most famous works.

Who knows what the future holds? I certainly don't. I sincerely hope that, in the long term, it looks a lot brighter, especially for everyone who has been affected by Recent Happenings.

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#oneaday Day 760: My own feelings on old games

First up, here's a good piece that I read earlier today, and which my resharing a clip of on Bluesky did Numbers to such a degree that I had to mute the thread. I stand by my comment of "fucking preach" about it, however, particularly the paragraph about today's games having their roots in older titles — and how it pays to not be snobbish about stuff released some time ago.

vibrant retro arcade machine with joysticks and buttons — Photo by Dan Butler on Pexels.com

If you're reading this, you probably don't need me to tell you my feelings about old games, but I'm going to talk about them anyway — if only for the benefit of anyone who might be stumbling across this blog for the first time, or for anyone who, somehow, did not know the following about me.

I love old games! I always have done. For as long as I can remember, I have loved going back to earlier gaming systems and either rediscovering old favourites, or discovering brand new ones. I quite regularly boot up the MiSTer's Atari 8-bit, ST and Amiga cores to play the games of my childhood — and the games that I lusted after in my childhood. I also explore the libraries of consoles that I never had the opportunity to own, or which were prohibitively expensive, or which just passed me by for one reason or another. It's a constant delight, and I think, as the article linked states, it has done me a lot of good, too.

Probably the best thing that Being Into Old Games has taught me is not to give a rat's ass about performance, unless said performance is actively detrimental to the overall experience. I grew up gaming on systems that could barely manage simple flat-shaded 3D polygonal scenes at about 10 frames per second, and had a ton of fun on platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, both of which have graphical capabilities it would be very easy to find laughable today if you're a snobbish dickhead.

There really are people out there who will declare games from this era (and earlier) "unplayable" because they run at an inconsistent frame rate, or a low resolution, or have blurry textures, or use a "weird" controller. (Fun fact: the Nintendo 64 controller is absolutely fine when playing games that were designed for it! That said, if you really don't get along with it, I recommend either this for modern USB devices, or this for original hardware.)

There are people out there who completely fail to grasp the absolute phenomenon that was GoldenEye and Perfect Dark split-screen multiplayer. None of us cared that the frame rate was, by today's standards, bobbins! The games were fun! That was literally all that mattered! And you can still live your life that way! I bet if I hooked up a MiSTer with four controllers and ran Perfect Dark on it at a party, people would be fighting over it by the end of the evening. (This makes the mistaken assumption that I would 1) throw a party and 2) have anyone to invite to a party, mind, but I am speaking purely hypothetically here.)

Don't get me wrong, it is undoubtedly nice to play a modern, high-resolution game that runs super smoothly and slickly. Certain genres particularly benefit from absolutely rock-solid performance — but that doesn't magically make games from years gone by that didn't run at a constant 60+ fps suddenly completely unplayable or not worth bothering with. Ridge Racer Type 4, one of the greatest video games ever created, only just about cracks 30 and runs at a resolution of 320×240 pixels (on NTSC displays, anyway) during races! And yet I go back to Ridge Racer Type 4 more than pretty much any other racing game released since then… except maybe the Project Gotham games.

One of the nicest things about older games that I'm coming to appreciate a whole lot more as I get older is that they just respect your time more. Even in RPGs, there's a lot less endless grinding, a lot less "content" designed for "player retention" — and I know some people like them, but the complete absence of Achievements and/or Trophies is absolute bliss, because it means you can play and enjoy each and every game exactly how you want to, without feeling obliged to tick things off a checklist — including boring, tedious things you don't actually want to do — lest you feel you haven't "Platinumed" it properly.

I am a strong, strong advocate for expanding your gaming horizons and exploring the incredibly vast, diverse and vibrant history of the medium. And I mean all of the history! There are Atari 2600 (River Raid! H.E.R.O.! Seaquest! Keystone Kapers!) and Intellivision (Night Stalker! Tower of Doom! Cloudy Mountain!) games that still play great today — and which I, personally, frequently return to, by choice, for a gaming session of an evening. There are myriad Super NES, PlayStation and Saturn RPGs just waiting for me to play them — and I'm looking forward to doing so. And even though I played a lot of N64 back in the day, there's still a lot of games from that relatively slim library that I've never tried — and really want to!

If you're concerned for the future of gaming — and given all the recent happenings, I absolutely do not blame you for that — then don't just give up and assume it's all over. Even if there were to be no more games released ever after tomorrow — and we all know that's not going to happen, regardless of whether or not we're actually in the process of seeing a new Crash happen — there are enough games that have already been released, across all platforms, to keep all of us busy for the rest of our lives.

Something doesn't stop being relevant, worthwhile or interesting because it's 20, 30, 40 years old or more. In many cases, these games are all the more remarkable for remaining relevant, worthwhile and interesting after so long — and it's not just nostalgia. There's something there; something of great value. And I implore you to spend some time exploring it, particularly if you've never done so.

Now I'm off to play Soul Blazer for the rest of the evening.

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#oneaday Day 759: Accidental multiplayer

Last night in Final Fantasy XI, I had an excellent experience that reminded me of one of the particularly fun things about games with persistent online worlds: the scope for accidental, unstructured yet nonetheless meaningful instances of playing with other people.

I was working my way through the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi, one of the last dungeons in the Chains of Promathia expansion. This dungeon initially looks like something of a labyrinth, but there's actually a linear path through it; a lot of exits are blocked off, forcing you to go one particular direction, and certain doors can only be triggered by activating a "Quasilumin" entity at a special alcove, which will then proceed on patrol — while you have to protect them, naturally — and open various portals along the way.

This task is soloable, particularly with the computer-controlled "Trust" characters you can bring nearly everywhere with you in the game at this point, but it can be a slow process, what with you having to stop and start the Quasilumin in order to keep them out of trouble, clear a path through the enemies ahead and follow along to make sure they don't leave you behind. There's also a time limit on each patrol, so you can't hang around too long.

Partway through my explorations, I ran into another player who was seemingly doing the same thing as me. We didn't really say a lot to one another, but it was pretty clear we were working on the same objective. Since Final Fantasy XI's dungeons are not instanced — that means you can just randomly run into other players doing the same thing as you, rather than getting your own "private" version of a dungeon to clear at your leisure — it tends to pay off if you team up with people you randomly run into.

And sure enough, it did. We settled into a good rhythm where my companion would keep an eye on the Quasilumin, starting and stopping it as required, while I would go on ahead and clear out the enemies in the path it was about to take. Together, it still took a while, but we eventually successfully made it through the whole dungeon, and it was a really nice, warm moment that we shared together.

I'm generally not a big fan of playing with random other people, whether the game in question is competitive or cooperative. In competitive games, I don't like dealing with sweaties who take things far too seriously, and in cooperative games… well, I also don't like dealing with sweaties who take things far too seriously. You would think cooperative games would be a place where "nice" people hang out, but in my experience, no, that is absolutely not the case. In fact, some cooperative games feel way more toxic than anything competitive I have ever played.

All of the above is the case if you are playing structured activities, whether they are cooperative or competitive. When people jump into something like this, of course they want to win, and if they feel like someone is holding them back in some way — whether or not that is a fair assessment — they will, if they're a Certain Type of Person, kick off.

But if you're in an activity where the two (or more) of you have run into one another by complete chance, I tend to find that it's much more likely you will have a pleasant shared experience with one another. Last night's example in Final Fantasy XI is just the most recent example, but I also still have very fond memories of a time I was playing Test Drive Unlimited on Xbox 360, back when its servers were still active, and encountered someone on the high-speed freeway that runs across a lot of the map. This person was obviously just hooning it up and down the freeway in their Ferrari looking for trouble, and so I provided some trouble for them. We didn't even get into the game's organised one-on-one races by flashing our lights at one another; we just careened across most of the map, causing chaos along the way and having a thoroughly lovely time in the process.

Other people can be all right, sometimes. If you catch them when they're very much "at play" rather than taking their entertainment extremely super-seriously, it can even be super-fun to hang out with them and just dick around — no worrying about stats, progress or efficiency. Just pure, unbridled fun and joy; something we're all too short of these days, and thus I encourage you to cling onto it whenever you encounter it.

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#oneaday Day 758: Hexagons and light

I'm definitely coming up on the end of the Chains of Promathia expansion for Final Fantasy XI. Know how I can tell? Because I'm into an area where everything is made out of hexagons and light, and the world doesn't quite behave as it "should".

I'm not entirely sure why this became such a common trope in role-playing games, particularly those of Asian origin. I assume there's some sort of inherent significance to hexagons — or perhaps someone once just thought they looked cool and futuristic, and everyone else copied that first person. Both explanations are entirely plausible.

A lot of people mock role-playing games that pull the "final boss is in space!" trope, but I love it. One of my favourite things in video games is getting the opportunity to explore and play in abstract environments. There's a definite appeal to realistic environments under the right circumstances, but for me, there's always something special about making that switch from "recognisable" to "completely alien". Doesn't matter what game it is; if you go from hanging out in "the real world" to running along platforms suspended in a starfield — or, indeed, as I have been doing in Chains of Promathia this evening, running across a seemingly solid "sea" that floats above the land far below me, leaving a trail of hexagons and the sound of musical notes with every step I take.

I think the reason I like it is the fact it drives home how video games give you the opportunity to "do" things that are outright impossible in real life. There is not actually anywhere that exists that consists of floating platforms in space or transparent hexagons suspended over a petrified natural environment, and thus having the opportunity to spend time in those places as a virtual world is appealing. It's fascinating. In some respects, it provides a window into the creators' imagination, allowing us a sense that we are sharing in something quite special.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that when you explore a realistic but nonetheless fictional world in a game, you're also stepping into the creators' imagination, but it never feels quite as exciting as getting the opportunity to go somewhere completely alien. It's a silly trope, probably one that is overused at this point — and definitely one that has been used inappropriately (Half-Life's finale says hello) — but it's one that I will always like and appreciate.

I am tempted to see if I can finish off Chains of Promathia this evening, but it is already midnight, so I feel like I should probably go to bed like a responsible adult. Probably.

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